With the top kill failing to stem BP's oil spill, concern shifts again to the clean-up effort. As crews dab stricken marshes by hand, we have to ask: Are there more innovative solutions to oil spills?

What started as an epic drama in the Gulf of Mexico—beginning with a rare, lethal oil rig explosion some six weeks ago and followed by a chain of never-before-attempted fixes to seal the underwater well—has settled into a sickening new reality. The 50,000- to-110,000-gallon-per-day leak could continue until August, BP has said, when a pair of relief wells will intersect with the damaged one and fill it with concrete. That's one of the better-case scenarios. Others involve the disintegration of the well head or other structural elements due to continuing efforts to divert or block the flow. That would mean exponentially more oil gushing into the gulf. Somehow, this could all get worse.

For the communities and wildlife already hit by the first incursions of oil, the fight to stem the flow is clearly over. The war to contain the oil, however, is just beginning. And while teams of million-dollar underwater robots work at the well's rupture on the ocean floor, the spill response topside could hardly get more low-tech. Skimming vessels attempt to vacuum up slicks, but it's a lost cause—a gallon of oil can spread to the size of a football field in an hour, quickly becoming too thin for skimmers to be effective. The spill has also plunged below the miles of boom floating in the gulf. So the stricken marshes are being dabbed, by hand, with special cloths and paper towels.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

There are far more innovative solutions to spill cleanup, particularly in the area of advanced materials that selectively absorb oil without soaking up water. Two years ago, researchers at MIT unveiled a mesh of nanowires that could form a kind of paper and that could stay dry in water for months while taking up oil and other hydrophobic liquids. The mesh could then be heated to release and recover the captured oil, and the nanopaper redeployed to the spill.

That a breakthrough material still in the lab two years ago wouldn't be ready for use in the Deepwater Horizon spill is no surprise. But another advanced material that can target oil has been available for more than a decade. AbTech CEO Glenn Rink founded his Arizona-based company as a direct response to the havoc wreaked by the Exxon Valdez and less-publicized tanker spills. In 1997, after years of testing, including a limited deployment in a spill in Aruba, AbTech launched the Smart Sponge. The solid material can float on the surface of the water, either incorporated into lengths of boom or dropped into specific areas from boats or aircraft. Like MIT's mesh, it attracts and captures oil and chemically similar pollutants while ignoring water, and can be left in place for months. But the Smart Sponge permanently bonds the oil, and the only way to access that stored energy is to burn the material itself. "It was a closed loop. We saw that as being really valuable," Rink says. But so far, no one has put an order in for the sponges.

The biggest reason for the lack of interest in the Smart Sponge, according to Rink, is the strange business of oil-spill cleanup. Oil firms don't typically deploy their own skimmers or towel-wielding employees—they hire someone else to do it. An entire industry of spill-response companies serves the oil industry at large, and in many cases a single outfit will be contracted to respond to potential spills from multiple energy firms. And for the most part, these spill responders are paid by the hour, using materials that are less efficient than the Smart Sponge but cheaper and more easily processed to recover oil.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Since BP and other energy firms aren't directly involved with cleaning up their spills, the Smart Sponge fell into a logistical limbo. Spill responders would need to buy and store tons of the polymer-based material, possibly raising their overall fee while billing fewer hours. Rink and AbTech were forced to move on, applying the material to a range of water-filtration applications. Last year, Time magazine featured Rink in a list of entrepreneurial heros. The oil industry barely seemed to notice.

The Deepwater Horizon debacle could change that. "We've been getting inquiries, including from BP, about how much product we have on hand, how quickly we can deploy it," Rink says. He has appeared on Glenn Beck, and a once-forgotten solution is suddenly being featured in online blogs and articles. Whether the oil industry can reconfigure itself to make large inventories of readily deployable, oil-targeting materials feasible, the demand is there. "There are no active purchases," Rink says, "but we're told orders are imminent. We've priced out probably over $10 million in sales."

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Popular Mechanics participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.